On the Kashmir hippy trail

Once a blissed-out star of the hippy trail, Kashmir dropped out of sight but is now back on the scene and more flamboyant than ever. Lucy Hughes-Hallett joins in this year's big adventure....

There's something miraculously disinhibiting about the proximity of water. In Nishat Bagh, the 12-terraced Mughal garden laid out in the 1630s on the lowest slopes of the mountains that tower above Srinagar's Dal Lake, I watched a troop of schoolgirls go wild among the fountains and canals. A watercourse bisects the garden, hurtling down waterfalls, erupting skywards in a long line of fountains, spreading into square pools enclosed by crumbling walls. On a Sunday evening the place is packed with men chatting cross-legged in ceremonious circles on the grass beneath enormous magnolia trees, with youths posing on ornamental bridges, silhouetted against the pearly luminosity of the lake which closes the view, and with women pacing the rose gardens. They are resplendently dressed - as all Kashmiri women are all the time - in gold-spangled gauze or flower-embroidered silk or cotton printed in colour combinations as brilliant as those in the boats of the city's waterborne flower sellers: rose-pink with turquoise, mauve with jade green, saffron with pomegranate-red.

The girls arrived as demure little models of Muslim decorum, white robes covering them from chin to ankle and wrist, their headscarves tightly secured. At a point where the water ripples along an ankle-deep channel, a bold girl stepped in. Another followed, and another and another. Someone slipped and grabbed at her friend, who went down after her, and in a trice the whole gaggle was tumbling and giggling and splashing. Their teacher, a young woman in tight crimson churidars and a silver-trimmed, bead-encrusted red and purple overdress, was splashed, at first inadvertently, and dimpled kindly. And then, seeing they might get away with it, all the girls started splashing her and she was down in the water with them and everyone was drenched and shrieking, and sheets of water were rising around them, and a shoal of tiny boys in their underpants were tumbling down the steps from an upper pool to see how they could add to the din.

Pictured: A food stall near the village of Naranag; The fountains at Nishat Bagh

On a pavilion in the nearby Shalimar gardens, a line from a classical Persian poem is incised into the stone: 'If there is paradise on the earth, it is this; it is this; it is this'. But for the past 20 years the Kashmiri paradise has been infested with serpents, as India and Pakistan fought over it, China sought to grab its share, and Kashmiri separatists resisted them all. Now, though, the British Foreign Office has altered its advice from No-Go to Proceed With Caution. There are still rifle-toting soldiers in Srinagar's old town, but on Dal Lake the houseboats are being refurbished, ready for what their owners hope will be a rush of travellers from the West.

Those houseboats are lovely by-products of a bit of legal artful-dodgery. Under the terms by which the 19th-century Maharaja was granted control of Kashmir, the British undertook not to build houses on his territory; but boats are not houses, and lakes are not lands. So the officials of the Raj continued to decamp in summer to the temperate Kashmiri paradise, living there in waterborne mansions. We stayed first on the Royal Houseboat. Outside, its eaves are trimmed with lacy fretwork.

Inside, the walls are panelled with cedar so the very air you breathe is delicious. There are chandeliers everywhere (five in my bedroom alone). There are silk carpets. There is massive, intricately carved walnut furniture. There is a veranda with cushioned benches ready for an afternoon snooze. There is Hassan, the 'shikara boy', who will paddle you around the lake in a canopied boat painted the colours of marigolds and delphiniums and pomegranate. And there is Mr Deen, the 'boat captain', always spruce in his white jacket and crocheted skull cap, who will call you sir or madam and bring you a gilt-rimmed cup of tea flavoured with cardamom, or serve you a feast of cinnamon-scented mutton and yogurt-dressed cauliflower on the flat roof overlooking the acres of lotus flowers which are what you get here instead of a garden.

In the heat of the day the lake is somnolent. Fish eagles sit still as bronze effigies on the top of pilings. Farmers glide silently by, their flat-bottomed wooden boats - called shikaras - so laden with the water weed they use as fertiliser that they appear, as they squat on the submerged prow, to be perched on nothing. Men loll on wooden piers, indolently trailing fishing lines.

The only creatures looking busy are tiny ducklings so weightless that they can scamper across the water-lily pads. But as the sun declines, the rumpus starts. Shikaras edge out of the back-canals to throng the open lake. The waterborne salesmen manoeuvre between them. There is Mr Wonderful, with his cargo of lilies. There is Delicious Man, who offers chocolate-coated walnuts, coconut ice and macaroons. There is the insistent boy selling saffron, and there are the quieter merchants who appear alongside likely clients, flipping open briefcases to reveal jewellery made of turquoise and lapis lazuli: it was from the mountains north of here that the precious lapis was exported along the Silk Road so that the artists of the Italian Renaissance could give their madonnas robes of celestial blue.

Pictured: The 17th-century Nishat Bagh gardens; a reed-collector in his boat on Dal Lake

There are boatmen selling soft drinks or homemade milk ice-lollies. And there are the fruit boats, heaped with greengages, cherries and sliced watermelon. We are in a market, and at a party, and taking part in a spectacle that keeps getting more colourful and raucous. Along the lakeshore road the drivers are honking their horns for the sheer pleasure of the noise.

The sun sets, and the call to prayer booms out from the mosques in the old city, adding to the hullaballoo. The mountains, which have all day been ghostly shapes looming through the haze, become clearly visible. The moon rises behind them. A second, artificial moon is rising, too - a white hot-air balloon, which pops up periodically from a stand of poplar trees, and teeters on the end of its ropes before being comically winched back down. Eagles wheel on the thermals, thorny dark shapes in outline against a pink sky. The lake people's canoes dart between the visitors' shikaras. It is all, as a memsahib from the time when the houseboats were first introduced might have said, too, too madly gay.

Not that the Kashmiris aren't capable of high seriousness. Above the lake stands the Pari Mahal. One of our guides translated its name as 'House of the Fairies', which seemed just right when I arrived there to find half a dozen small sisters in silver-embroidered, petal-coloured churidar suits playing beneath the arcaded walls. But a pari (or peri) is more closely equivalent to an angel than to a flower fairy; and this palace, with its immense views of lake and city and the fort beyond them, was built as a place of religious contemplation.

Down in the old city, the 15th-century Jamia Masjid mosque, which can accommodate 30,000 worshippers in its cedar-columned halls, is austerely grand; but the Khanqah of Shah Hamadan, copiously decorated with carved and painted flowers, borrows its architecture from an older, Buddhist tradition, which makes of a building a spiky visual puzzle, playful as a pagoda. The women's gallery, where local ladies sit murmuring over hand-illuminated Korans, is like a garden, bright with stylised depictions of irises and daisies. Behind the mosque, a terrace overhangs the river; and across the water are dilapidated wooden mansions, once the homes of merchant princes, from which project balconies, finely carved and fretted, where one might sit and compose verses to the moon.

Pictured: Khanqah of Shah Hamadan mosque in Srinagar; women at prayer in the mosque

There is still a lot of trade in Srinagar. All day, and late into the night, there's a clanging and a honking from the street markets and smoke from the puri vendors' stalls. Ground spices, laid out pyramid-style on the stone-flagged floors of tiny booths in the old town, are beautiful, and so are the heaped fruit stalls, and the piles of aluminium cooking pots. Butchers' shops are gruesome. Sheep-carcases drip blood on the pavement. This is a carnivorous culture, and not squeamish about it. But the most delightful market for bystanders is the waterborne one that operates before sunrise, where the only merchandise is the produce of the lake's floating gardens, the waterlogged islets on which farmers grow runner beans, carrots and squashes the size of baseball bats. A mighty hum of conversation can be heard across the lake. Men wearing kurta-pyjamas manoeuvre their long boats prow to prow, the better to negotiate. More keep gliding in along the mirror-black boat-ways. The marzipan-coloured lilies and lotus flowers are still closed, waiting for the sun, and the mountains are clear, tinged with purple and pine green.

We made sorties out of paradise, the best leading us up through valleys lined with terraced paddy fields to the high village of Naranag. There the road gives out in front of a half-ruined temple to Shiva, a remnant of the ancient Hindu kingdom of Kashmir.

From here, our guide Ajaz Kotroo leads week-long treks with a baggage train of ponies. We had only one day. The track, shaded by walnut trees, followed a helter-skelter river - pale-green, glacier-fed, roaring. We seemed to be leaving the world behind us, but this landscape, apparently so remote, is populous. The nomadic Gujjar people bring their animals up here in summer, staying in houses with dry-stone walls and flat turf roofs.

The men dye their jutting beards with henna, and stride across the hillsides, turbaned and wrapped in locally woven plaids, following their little horses. Women waved at us from the streams where they wash their clothes and dishes; and when our photographer indicated that she'd like some pictures of them in their houses, they ushered us into orderly spaces where stone walls and pine-trunk columns had been smoothly plastered with clay, where cooking was done over a wood fire, and where cows, sharing the living space, provided an animate heating system for cool mountain nights, and sweetened the air with their breath.

Back in Srinagar we transferred for our last night to Sukoon, a houseboat that looked from its fretworked exterior much like the Royal, but was decorated inside in a sparer, more modern style and fitted with air-con and high-pressure showers. Both boats were cedar-panelled and surrounded by water-lilies. But staying with the Royal's Mr Deen was like being part of a house party, in a house that hasn't been renovated for decades and therefore has a slightly fusty charm of a kind that can't be bought; whereas the Sukoon was unmistakably hotel-living, complete with enormous beds, picture windows, teak recliners beneath parasols, and attentive waiters whose silk cummerbunds were patterned with lotus flowers matching those on the bathroom blinds. Here, instead of the meat-heavy local cuisine, we dined on broth fragrant with lemongrass and ginger, and delicately spiced lake fish.

Pictured: An over-water walkway at Sukoon houseboat; a bedroom on Sukoon houseboat

The Royal is moored in a sequestered part of the lake, from which no trace of the modern world is visible. Sukoon overlooks open water, which Indian visitors, who generally like hustle and bustle, prefer. Normally, dozens of shikaras would have been visible as we ate breakfast on the roof. But India's Prime Minister was visiting Srinagar, and the city was under lockdown. On the veranda of each houseboat, a couple of soldiers were posted, polite but armed. Our ride to the airport was eerie. Only outgoing visitors like ourselves were allowed to move. There were no other floating pleasure-seekers to wave at. No sign of Mr Wonderful. No fisherman casting his net. On land, the markets' cacophony was silenced. We motored easily through streets which the night before had been scarcely passable for the number of people buying, selling, strolling, staring. It was a reminder how new is the peace in Kashmir's paradise. Make the most of it. Go now.

Steppes Travel (www.steppestravel.co.uk) organises trips to Kashmir. A seven-night itinerary, including stays on the Royal Houseboat and Sukoon, costs from about £2,200 per person, including flights. The author and photographer were looked after in India by Steppes' local partners, Eastbound in Delhi and Royal Tours & Travels in Srinagar. The trekking guide Ajaz Kotroo can be contacted on ajazkotroo@gmail.com.

This story first appeared in the March 2014 issue of Condé Nast Traveller magazine